Living In Fear of Mass Shootings Is Giving Students PTSD

SANTA FE, TX - MAY 18: Santa Fe High school students (L-R) Alexis Markis, Kassidy Taves and Averi Gary hold each other during a vigil for the victims of the Santa Fe High School shooting where nine students and one teacher were killed . (Photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images)The Washington Post

Last year, MollyKate Cline received a text from her college security system. A possible active shooter situation was unfolding at the college across the parking lot from her dorm — the dorm where she and her roommate would spend the subsequent hours on lockdown before they were given the “all clear” to go outside.

“I had a panic attack and I remember, I ran to the other side of my dorm because I didn’t want to be by a window,” says MollyKate, who was a freshman at Columbus College of Art in Columbus, Ohio, at the time. The text didn’t furnish any concrete information, leaving her to pass the time combing headlines for clues as to what kind of danger she might be in. “All I could really hear were cop cars and ambulances and sirens all around me. And then finally, I didn’t hear any ambulances or sirens anymore after a couple hours, and I just got a text from my school saying the coast was clear and at 3 o’clock we could go back to class.” Her school never addressed the outcome.

“It could literally happen anywhere,” she explains. “It was just the most helpless feeling, there was nothing we could do,” MollyKate says of the lockdown, adding that she feels fortunate to count this as her only personal experience with a shooting. Still, shootings have become prevalent enough that MollyKate considers the prospect of gun violence in her immediate community less of an “if,” and more of a “when.”

Living with the reality that a school shooting could happen at any time means living with a constant degree of fear that your school, your mosque, your church, your office, your block, your town, could be next. Perhaps one of the most visceral clips circulating last week after the shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, where 10 people were left dead was that of a student survivor named Paige who told a local reporter “I've always kind of felt that eventually it was going to happen here too.”

The impact of the constant fear of a mass shooting at your school has implications we are only beginning to understand. Adolescent depression and anxiety have become increasingly common in recent years; of course, their rise isn’t solely the result of gun violence, but accumulating anxiety certainly isn’t helped by unrelenting reports of yet another mass shooting. Even for teens who aren’t already living with mental health strains, vicarious trauma can take a toll.

The frequency of shootings produces what Rachel O’Neill — a licensed professional clinical counselor based in Poland, Ohio — calls a “kindling effect.” Five months in, 2018 has already seen 103 mass shootings. One of the most recent examples came on Friday, when 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis packed his father’s shotgun and revolver onto Santa Fe High School’s campus and killed 10 people, injuring over a dozen more. The news comes just three months after gunman Nikolas Cruz shot 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, an incident that galvanized cries for gun control around the country.

“We see the shooting in Parkland,” O’Neill tells Teen Vogue, “then we see the shooting in Santa Fe, and we might not necessarily articulate that that’s upsetting to us, or that we’re stressed out about that, or that we’re thinking about it. And yet we’re still carrying that baggage with us.”

Recurrent shootings can cue those who’ve survived any brand of gun violence to experience the trauma all over again. According to O’Neill, though, constantly harboring fear or anxiety surrounding an event can also cause PTSD , a reaction often characterized by feeling on edge, detached, avoidant of specific scenarios, and by unwanted memories of trauma that surface without warning. In fact, she notes, one criterion the DSM-5 set for PTSD is, “Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event.” That exposure can be direct or indirect, and could result from seeing each new tragedy replayed continually in media coverage.

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In part, we’re seeing so many young people present with mental health issues because we now have a vocabulary for our feelings that didn’t exist 20 years ago, O’Neill explains. But the trend also has roots in the 24-hour news cycle: Emergency notifications bombard you on your phone, on social media, on television, in print. Young people, the group most often and most acutely affected by shootings, might have a hard time distancing themselves from repeated tragedy — especially when it threatens the places where they’re supposed to feel safe. That can create a state of perpetual emotional [instability], O’Neill says.

“Students, they go to class, and they’re sitting there, and even if they’re not consciously thinking about it, it’s still part of their experience,” O’Neill says. “They’re still sort of in their head and their most basic, primitive thoughts, thinking, What would I do if something like this were to happen now? And how would I respond if something like this were to happen in my school?”

Em Odesser, an 18-year-old high school senior living in Westchester, New York, has asked herself these kinds of questions during active shooter drills: “This would be my only protection against someone who was trying to murder me: A desk. A door. A dark closet,” she tells Teen Vogue.

She sees Parkland students post prom pictures, for example, and the connections become inescapably clear: “We are going through the exact same thing and the only difference between us is like one gun that enabled someone to wreck life,” Em continues. “The only difference is I haven’t experienced that.” But she understands that she could.

Em helped organize her school’s walkout in mid-March, part of a string of coordinated protests nationwide that underlined students’ demand for gun safety. It’s possible that she takes the topic a little more seriously than most, but still: “I think that everyone is a little bit on edge, even the people who don’t vocalize it as much,” she says. “How could you not feel a little bit terrified knowing that it happens so randomly and so often?”

The prospect of a shooting amplifies Em’s anxiety and depression, which O’Neill says is natural. “Those individuals who have maybe preexisting depression or anxiety or something like a bipolar disorder could certainly be triggered by these types of events, even if they are only hearing about them through the news,” she explains.

Olivia Hawkins, a 17-year-old student at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, says she’s never been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Still, she’s “seen and felt a decline in happiness” since 2012, the year George Zimmerman shot and killed a teenage Trayvon Martin, and Adam Lanza opened fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School. “That’s when I realized this issue can happen anywhere, to anyone, at any time,” Olivia says. “It’s a horrifying reality that we can’t escape.”

“We’re the targets of these school shootings,” she says. “We all express feelings of anxiety; we shouldn’t have to sit in the place we once felt comfortable in and now be scared of losing our lives in a classroom.”

As a woman of color and a student, Olivia feels her personal safety jeopardized from multiple angles. She talks about gun violence with her peers, rather than adults, because her peers empathize in ways adults either can’t, or won’t — a point that came up a lot with the women interviewed for this article. Among the most disheartening things about the shooting epidemic is that it does seem preventable, and although students have spent months proposing actionable solutions, Congress hasn’t budged.

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“It’s not only anxiety about having to go through something so tragic as a school shooting, [or] a mass shooting,” says Maddie Lesser, an 18-year-old senior, Em’s classmate, and founder of Westchester Students Demand Action. “[It’s] also anxiety about getting your voice across, getting your thoughts understood and heard, and making sure that what you’re doing isn’t for nothing.”

There are practical things a person struggling with anxiety and depression can do, O’Neill says: If it’s tied to the news cycle, set aside time each day to tune out and turn off your phone. Meditation and mindfulness practices help anchor you in the moment, and can be a good way to head off anxiety’s future-based fears. And of course, she recommends speaking with a mental health professional, even just as a preventive measure.

And according to O’Neill, this is a problem only Congress can fix. “The single biggest factor that would mitigate the sadness, the stress, the worry, the fear is gun safety legislation.”